Freedom, movement and love:
Wally Serote’s OR Prof Ciraj Rassool
I
had the tremendous honour, from about 2005, to spend time with Luli Callinicos over a decade or as we served together on different heritage councils and different committees ,including the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), the National Heritage Council (NHC), as part of the process of heritage transformation. This also included being in conversation with her about Freedom Park, where she was council chairperson, and where I served on committees. In this time it was also an honour to have participated in conversation with Bra Wally Serote and his colleagues about the basis of creating Freedom Park, an institution about the making of freedom in South Africa. More generally, it was a tremendous learning experience to be in conversation with Bra Wally and his colleagues about the installation and the creation of institutions of national heritage. Along the way, it was a wonderfully engaging experience to have regular opportunities to talk with Luli about her project on the sites of significance in the life story of Nelson Mandela, that became The World that Made Mandela as well as her research on the biography of Oliver Tambo, which became Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains. These were important engagements for me because I was also writing a biography and engaging with approaches to biography. We had a fundamental shared dilemma, as I remember our conversations: How do you pay homage to a leader in a way that pays respect but that does not take him out of his movement and also does not remove him from society and his social relationships? Those were the kinds of questions that our colleagues faced at Freedom Park as tremendous pressure was brought to bear on them to turn its landscape into a kind of Heroes’ Acre along the lines of Zimbabwe and Namibia. This would have been to turn the site into a cemetery of heroes, and not a site of reflection and memorial.
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Bra Wally and his colleagues resisted those pressures. And the care with which they embarked upon new methodologies was interesting to behold, as they embraced indigenous knowledge systems to create the Isivivane, the Garden of Remembrance, with soil and rocks and plants from every place where South Africans fell – as a place of mourning, not of hero-worshipping. Because the question that is raised for us – and it is the question that Luli also asked; and it is the question that was implicitly asked at Freedom Park – is: How do we put Oliver Tambo in national memory? Reading Bra Wally’s beautiful epic poem, Sikhalel’ u-OR: A Praise Poem for Oliver Tambo, I was reminded of what Luli used to tell me over and over about OR’s humility, about his refusal to be called “president”: “I’m only the acting president, I am president because others are in prison.” “He was a proxy president,” she’d say. “He listened to all sides … He was a conciliator of opposing views … He personified collective leadership.” This is what I came to learn about Oliver Tambo, known as OR, and the themes of his biography. These ideas about Tambo’s biography went against of what was being installed in South Africa that I describe elsewhere as a memorial complex marked by a biographic order. In this framework, at many sites and in many places in South Africa, the biographies of leaders were taken not just as lessons of struggle but as lessons for which we had to be obedient, in a framework of citizenship that was about obedience. This work of biographic poetry is not that. This is a vivid, poignant, lyrical, gentle and yet complex work that draws our attention to the sonic and sonorous, to song: songs of freedom; songs of joy; sounds of violence, and to the thuds of bodies and the thuds of history. This is a work of love, of intimacy and respect. This is not the biographical as commanding obedience. This is for OR, who loved his people with what Wally calls the granite-hard love, unbreakable love. It is about movement,
